LGBT rooms make gay students feel safe, let’s roll out the rainbow carpet
For teenagers, leaving the family home and moving to college for the first time can be one of the most anxiety-producing events of their young lives. They will be in a new environment not knowing a soul, and will have to figure out, many for the first time, how to feed themselves and do their own laundry. (Just throw it all in the washer on cold, kids, and it will turn out fine.) But there is a particular anxiety for LGBT youth headed off to college, many of whom might still be in the closet. There is the fear of ridicule and alienation from their peers, and of violence against them. To combat this, the University of Sheffield recently announced that in the next academic year it would provide accommodation for LGBT students that would serve as a “safe space for students to be themselves”. It has received 30 applications for the 12 rooms and vows to offer more designated spaces in the future.
This led to an article in the Times saying the university had been “warned about ghettoising LGBT students”. It seems to forget that gay people for decades have chosen to live in “gaybourhoods” in large cities, not simply to be able to live as their authentic selves, but also to ensure their safety. For many LGBT people, a ghetto is exactly what they are looking for. There are some that even want the queer community to have an independent nation.
Even so, these fears of segregation seem largely unfounded. By no means is it compulsory for students who identify with one of the colours of the LGBT rainbow to live in these rooms. The flats are near more traditional housing so students can mingle.
In the Times, Simon Thompson, the director of Accommodation for Students, the UK’s largest university housing service, made it clear he did not approve of Sheffield’s plan nor a similar one at Georgetown University in Washington DC. “University is about opening your horizons and meeting people from different cultures, different backgrounds, different sexualities, everything,” he said. “It’s a disadvantage if people close themselves off and don’t socialise with straight people. It seems like madness to me.”
On the contrary, the idea that college students, perhaps the most social humans on the planet, will only befriend those in their immediate vicinity is madness. Anyone who has a degree knows that, over four years, friends are made from among a wide swath of people, both inside and outside of one’s subject area and accommodation block. Thompson is right that college life should prepare kids for wider society beyond university. But the fledgling queers of this world need a place where they feel like they belong to gain the confidence needed to operate in the world at large. This living arrangement doesn’t hinder their ability to integrate, it optimises it.
For many, the social aspect of university life is just as important as what one learns in classes. What straight critics of LGBT dorm life fail to realise is that this is something that gay young people, especially those from more rural or conservative areas, have dreamed about. They finally get the chances that all the other youngsters had in high school: to be around people just like them, with the same interests, to be able to flirt with and ask out those they fancy without the fear that their romantic yearnings will lead to exposure, bullying, or worse. This is especially true for trans students living as their confirmed gender for the first time.
Yes, college should be about opening doors and expanding horizons, but many LGBT students can’t do that until they feel safe. A recent study by the gay civil rights group Stonewall found that 42% of gay university students stayed in the closet for fear of discrimination. College should not only be about finding what one wants to do as a career, but also about exploring all of life’s possibilities. That can only happen if students have a space where they feel comfortable. Giving LGBT students a place in which they can be themselves will foster precisely the well-rounded experience that straight, cisgendered people take for granted when they go to university.
Heading off to college is hard enough. Let’s give LGBT young people the gift of only having to worry about the things that all college kids worry about, like figuring out the laundry. (For that, the same rules apply. Just stick it on cold.).
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